Greater Atlanta

Unitarian

Universalist

Congregations

Radio Station Selection

• The WABE 90.1FM broadcast area directly encompasses eight (8) UU congregations¹. No other PBS station in our district has such a high concentration of current UU members. Georgia congregations outside of metro Atlanta are served by the public radio station GPB/"Peach State,” which utilizes 14 separate stations. Similarly, Alabama's congregations are served by at least 4 public radio stations (WLRH, WHIL, WTSU, WBHM, and state-wide). We believed that working with one station's program director and one schedule that served 8 congregations, would best serve our goal of collecting measurable data.
• The 9 participating congregations that operate within WABE’s broadcast area offer a broad spectrum of environments, from pastoral to corporate. We wanted to evaluate the effectiveness of this campaign in different congregational environments.
• Also, these 9 congregations have the human resources (professionals with radio advertising expertise, enthusiastic ministers, and willing volunteers) that are required to carry out the pilot program to its successful conclusion.
• The management at WABE 90.1FM provided listener demographics and metrics that reinforced the similarities in demographics to UUs in metro Atlanta (eg, Arbitron and Scarsborough) (Appendix G, WABE Demographics)

Conclusions

• Since our objectives and efforts were so focused for this project, we capitalized on an excellent opportunity of working with only one radio station. It was much easier to coordinate schedules, contracts, air-times, and weekly updates with only one Account Executive, rather than coordinating with different stations and contacts.
• While this focus was an excellent opportunity, it was definitely not perfect. Our interaction with the PBS station was often complicated by miscommunication and misunderstandings. As we reviewed the process, the Radio Team discussed the differences between working with a corporate-sized bureaucratic entity, as compared to a smaller, owner-operated station. We hope the congregations that might interact with smaller PBS/NPR stations will have easier encounters.
• There is an altruistic value in supporting public broadcast stations, and many UUs are supportive of the often educational and liberal programs on these stations. Furthermore, PBS/NPR reaches listeners with demographics similar to many of our UU congregations and there is great value in making UUism an identifiable and mainstream religion. These subjective and qualitative aspects are immeasurable yet important to the decision whether or not to advertise on PBS/NPR stations (Appendix F, Feedback).